You’ve been blogging now for however long, and your seeing traffic on your posts, just not a whole lot. You may be wondering when your big break is coming. You really wanted this to work, but apparently it’s a lot harder than you thought. Well my first question to you is: are you promoting that post? You can make a big difference in your traffic when your marketing through social media.

Once you write a killer post, even if it’s got the latest recipe for dark chocolate cake, or whatever, you shared it on Facebook, Tweeted it, and pinned it, and then waited. You waited and waited, and only crickets. Yep, that’s usually what happens.

Promotion 101

I didn’t take marketing, but I do know that when a new restaurant or store is coming to your city, they start advertising it MONTHS ahead of time. You’ll see the stream of commercials, it will be for the best steak ever, at the restaurant 5 hours from where you are. WHY, you’re wondering. Most likely they are headed your way very soon. They are creating buzz around their business. You want to do the same to your posts. Since you can’t promote your posts before you post them…..wait, you can! You can totally promote that post, and create buzz around it by sharing snippets of what it’s about! You can share photos and information about what is coming soon to your blog. Mentioning to your followers/fans on social media to be watching out for it. When the post finally goes live, you want to make sure and share your post EVERYWHERE, and get this, MORE than once, twice, and even five times!

Your blog isn’t like the field in Field of Dreams. There is no build it and they will come. They have to know it’s there! You have to tell them. The best way to do this is social media. Do it, and do it often. But don’t overkill it.

Social Media Schedule

Grab yourself a social media scheduling tool to do the work for you. I LOVE CoSchedule and Tailwind. (if you decide to purchase Tailwind through that link, it’s an affiliate, and I’ll receive a small percentage) Both are my right hand when it comes to behind the scenes social media.

This is exactly what I do for every.single.post that I write:

CoSchedule:

Share on Facebook Page, Twitter, and Pinterest the same time and day that it posts.

Share on Facebook Page and Twitter, next day, at best time. (best time will go out based on your own audience..see CoSchedule is genius!)

Share on Facebook and Twitter one week later, at best time.

Share on Facebook and Twitter one month, at best time.

I then set the days up to share on the same day every month for the next six months, at the best time. You’ve just written one post, but guaranteed it to be shared for HALF A YEAR, or however long you have scheduled it!

I love how easy it is to use too. This is at the bottom of this post right now. You just hit the plus signs, select where you want to share it, and set the dates/time, and you’re all set. It’s how I schedule like I mentioned above. I don’t even have to leave WordPress or my post!

Tailwind:

On the day the pin goes live, I head over to my post and click the Pinterest icon on my sidebar, and hit the schedule button, and schedule that pin to all of my group boards, and then to all of my boards that are relevant.

I then hop over into Tailwind, and shuffle it, so that the pins aren’t all going at once. As you can see right now, I have over one thousand pins scheduled out to all of my boards.

Now, look at where my one post is being shared at! Lot’s of eyes. I also will share the post on my personal Facebook page as well. And Instagram too. Just in case. Instagram is slow growing for me, and it is crazy to me that if you aren’t posting 5 times a day that people unfollow you!! But that is for another day, for another blogger to tackle, because I am not going to even try and understand Instagram.

If you do not have any group boards, start looking! Go to your favorite bloggers, check through their boards, and if you see any group boards you like, click on them, see if they are accepting contributors, and follow the directions. They all require you to follow the board and the creator of the board. They will show up in your Tailwind once you accept the board on Pinterest. Easy peasy. There are also Facebook groups to help you locate group boards for Pinterest.

Promoting with Facebook Groups

Ahhh, Facebook groups, where the heck were you when I started blogging? I really wished I would have known about these in the beginning. When I first started blogging I spent all of my time promoting my posts on blog parties. It was a lot more trouble than what it was worth. While it brought me a lot of traffic, I didn’t take off to where I’m at now until I discovered, and started utilizing Facebook groups. *I am not knocking blog link parties. If they work for you, great, I just felt that my time is better spent using Facebook groups.*

Facebook groups are groups on Facebook that are run by other bloggers (usually). They can range from certain types like food, lifestyle, fashion, or a combination of whatever. They can also vary by Instagram sharing and Pinterest sharing. I belong to some of those too. Most of them though will have threads where you drop a link (post link, Facebook link, pin link, etc) and then you will comment, like, repin, tweet, or whatever the directions in the thread call for, on the links that others shared. So if 50 people have shared links this means that at least those 50 will be doing whatever the directions say! That could be 50 comments – 50 Facebook likes – 50 repins – etc. This is where things can really set a post into viral mode! I’ve had several viral posts happen thanks to these groups. A viral post is something that is very good and something that you want to happen very much, in case you didn’t know.

Here is an example of one of the groups I belong too. They are all set up differently, but this one has a pinned post at the top of the group, which makes it super simple to keep up with the days posts.

To find Facebook groups that do this sort of sharing, just start searching the groups area on Facebook. There are all sorts. Most of them require you to have a blog, and you’ll need to provide the URL for that.

Keep in mind that I am only covering promoting on what I consider the major social media outlets; Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. My posts automatically post to Twitter when they go live. And then I set up Tailwind to post to Twitter for me every time they post on my behalf. I don’t really use Twitter. My Twitter account dates back to my first blog in 2007. I do hop over and follow companies that I like, and when I’m on a blog that I like, I will click their Twitter link and go follow them, to help their numbers grow, but as far as organic tweets and retweeting it’s just not something I do.

IF YOU JOIN GROUPS LIKE THIS, PLEASE FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS, AND PLEASE RECIPROCATE. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

Organic Promotion vs Scheduled

There has been a lot of information floating around regarding organic promotion and scheduled. Thanks to the constant changing algorithms, organic promotion is far superior, I believe. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t schedule anything. I make sure to schedule posts because I want a presence on social media when I’m not there. I use Tailwind because it would take me at least an hour to go through and pin one post to every single group board on Pinterest. I just make sure to go through my Pinterest feed at least once a day pinning 20 or so of others pins, on top of any that I may be repinning from those Facebook groups. I’ll be completely honest about my Facebook, I’ve always scheduled my posts. I think I’ve shared a handful of posts in real time. I use Tailwind to promote my own posts, and I sit down once a week and use the Facebook scheduler and post twice a day, other bloggers posts.

If you do these things, you will see your pageviews start to grow. There is so much more I have to add to promoting your content, but for now, this is a big start. Look for part four of our series How to Quit Your Job and Become a Full Time Blogger: Media Kits and Pricing Guides. Since there is so much to cover when it comes to promoting, I am also working on a second post all about promoting content.

What promotions do you find work the best? I’ve never spent my own money on an ad for gaining followers. Have you? How did that work out for you? Are you already using Tailwind or CoSchedule?

I think this is an important aspect of blogging that people don’t realize they have to do when they start a blog. There’s so much more to blogging than just publishing great content. I think promoting your content is one of the most time consuming parts of blogging. I’ll admit, I don’t love it, but it has to be done! Thanks for the tips.

I’ve been getting so frustrated with social media lately. I’m not reaching my own audience with the new algorithms and “too much” seems to be any more than 2 posts. That just seems so few in a 24 hour period!

That was a great read, thank you! Promotion is key! One of the things I love about facebook post promotion is how you can select your audience. There are so many levels of targeting available, you can get your message in front of the right people.

Promotion is so important. One needs to build as much visibility as possible across the channels. Also there is so much content available on the net, efforts need to be made to differentiate from the others and project a unique front.

The promotions are so important! And I started the way you did – a couple of blogging link parties did well for me, but not really well enough, and it was so good when I fund groups! (Which also helped me find other bloggers in my niche!)

I’ve had great results promoting my blog through tailwind and facebook groups! Many people don’t know about facebook groups and how effective they can be to promote your content, so I always like to keep it my little secret haha

I use Latr to schedule my Instagram posts. I really like it because I can do in and do everything on my laptop and then it sends me an alert to my phone. It saves so much time and helps me promote my blog. I also find FB Groups helpful as long as the people in them and running them are kind. There are a few groups where they continue to change rules and then rudely kick people out without much of warning and notice.

I’ve been bloging for awhile now and hoping for a break through. I haven’t tried tailwind or coschedule before but I’ve heard many people raved about it.This sounds good, I’m going to look into this more.

This is wonderful advice on scheduling! So many people don’t realize that you need to really promote promote promote to get your words out there. I love the Field of Drams reference lol I wish it was that easy

Been blogging for sometime now and I am still in the process of learning. Reading tips form other bloggers are such a big help. Also I tried joining groups that supports bloggers too and its a big help for me.

Great advice. I do not post articles everyday, for the reason that I want my posts to be well thought of, well researched and would be of value to my readers. It is not easy to come up with great content. For me, it takes days! I will be heeding your advice and see where this takes me. Thanks for sharing!

I’ve really been wanting to try a social media scheduler. It would be so helpful with ny busy life. I wish all platforms would have their own private scheduling like Facebook does! Since they don’t, these options sound awesome!!

The big mistake a lot of us make is coming up with great content and then not getting it out there. I love your reference to Field Of Dreams, because people won’t just come if they don’t know it is there. I have to try Tailwind because Pinterest is such a great platform!

This is a great post for those wanting to quit their jobs and blogger full time. It is so important to you to know what you are getting into before you make a live changing decision. Having the right tools to be successful is one of the major things you need to research. Thanks for sharing the information.

i really love your posts , everytime i read your posts you change my thoughts about marketing and how i can turn my hobby to a business a grow it much more
Thanks again for sharing This Post , hope hire from you ASAP.

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Hey, I'm Joanna, and I'm so glad that you stopped by! Here at Everyday Made Fresh you will find a variety of topics. However, my heart is in the kitchen so I like to share recipes for the busy family in mind. Most meals only require 30 minutes of your time, and the ingredients can easily be found at your local grocery store. Read More!